Every vote counts. That’s what they tell us to convince us to vote. But it’s not even close to true.
Every Vote Counts, Unless You Mean “Every Vote” Actually
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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A variant of the saying that if voting made a difference, it’d be illegal – or as in the cases you mention above, more or less impossible. Or, to take another variant, often attributed to Stalin : it’s not who votes, but who counts (or does not) the votes that matters….
Henri
Speaking of Stalin. The line among the Dems used to be, we count every vote. We throw them in the air, and the ones for our opponents that stay up in the air, we count. All of them.
The tradition of vote tampering is long and storied, but I wonder if it really ever works? Is it possible to rig vote counting at a sufficiently high-enough level to swing a major contest? Sure, there are outliers, in hindsight, where a time traveler could alter the outcome (go back to Broward County with a superior ballot design to eliminate confusion) with just a little effort. But I wonder if, in a reasonably functional system, it can be carried off.
Secondly, concerning Hillary Clinton (her mentor is Henry Kissinger, the war criminal). The Hill crowd keeps going on about how she “won” by 3 million votes. No. She won the popular vote by 3 million. Look at the World Series for an example of what’s going on: You have to win four of seven games. They don’t total up all the runs from all the games and declare the winner based on most runs. If some team plays three games in a row and wins each one 20-0, and then loses the next four 1-0, the winner of those four sad little 1-run games is the winner of the Series. No one has a fit about it. No one goes around, “But they had 30 runs to the other team’s four!!!1!”
Furthermore, technically, she didn’t even win the popular vote. With the known, documented instances of how the dnc rigged the primaries (which she still barely managed to win) with outright deception, front-loading of superdelegates, etc., Hill’s entire effort has to have an asterisk put on it: she didn’t win it fair and square. Quite possibly, Donald Trump didn’t play fair either (if such a concept exists in national politics), but so far, although I’ve seen evidence that strongly hints at Trump having done things, all I’m being presented with is “Trump’s guilty, they’ve got proof his son did such and such” kind of things.
All I can say is, I suspect the dems will fail in their Trump Ejection Attempts. They just don’t have anything sexy enough to remove Trump. We live in an era where Amazon shows up in New York and, as a multibillion-dollar profitable business, says, “We need tax breaks and all sorts of shit from you before we put our HQ here and bring 15,000 high-paying jobs.”
And everyone eating their TV dinner because they’re too tired from work or hopelessness to actually cook something is thinking the same thing: Those “high-paying jobs” are going to go to people who would have had NO trouble finding a high-paying job in the first place. The factory jobs? Those will pay minimum wage and go nowhere. $30K a year in New York? Barely possible. And when the rents go through the roof and into orbit because, hey, that’s what happens wherever all these tech-bros show up? $30K is unlivable.
And the dems think the public is going to support bouncing Trump out because he did EXACTLY the same sort of fuck-the-poor horseshit Amazon and eBay and all those other giant megacorps did? Oh, golly, Trump cheated to get ahead. Thank God that Mark Zuckerberg plays it straight and true all the time.
The election rules, which everyone was aware of — unlike how Bernie Sanders was not aware of how Hillary Clinton (friend of war criminal Henry Kissinger) had been handed the debate questions ahead of time by the dnc, and all the shenanigans Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile got up to as well — clearly explained what constituted a win: the majority of the Electoral College votes.
Keep in mind, also, that after the Supremes decided the election in 2000, we had eight years of Pres. Cheney. Then the dems won the presidency. AND THEY DID NOT GET RID OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. (They also did not tell two of the oldest supreme court justices to step down IN CASE Hillary lost the election so that younger replacements could keep the court balanced.)
Nope.
I dislike Trump. But I’ll give him one thing: he actually won the election on his own. Or at least did a halfways decent job of hiding his cheats.
Hey, Alex –
> Is it possible to rig vote counting at a sufficiently high-enough level to swing a major contest?
I don’t *believe* so. That may be the only good part of the duopoly. “They” don’t trust each other so at worst the cheating in a blue state might balance out the cheating is a red state. As soon as we have a single party that advantage goes out the window.
> They just don’t have anything sexy enough to remove Trump.
As is often the case, I hope you’re wrong and fear you’re right. And the important word is, indeed, ‘sexy.’
We’ve got him dead-to-rights on emoluments violations, but it’s just not sexy. When Trump was merely a slumlord, rich guys who visited him in NYC naturally stayed at his hotel. They switched to his DC hotel to do business with him in DC, which has coincidentally been hosting a lot of foreign dignitaries lately. It’s just good manners when visiting a slumlord, but it’s (theoretically) illegal when visiting the POTUS.
T-Mobile’s come under scrutiny for staying there while lobbying for their merger.
But best of all, the DC hotel building is owned by the government. Its lease specifically states that it may not be held by an elected official. Somehow the office in charge didn’t notice for nearly two years, now that they have they will move quickly to order lunch.
But it’s not sexy.
We’ve got him dead-to-rights on Obstruction of Justice, that alone was sexy enough to bring down Nixon – today it elicits yawns.
Even the most devout deniers have to admit that DastardlyRussiansGate is doubleplus Sexy!
(Disclaimer: I am not offering to debate the merits of DRG on this thread, merely noting that it is sexy.)
IMnsHO – It’s not only imperative that Trump goes down, but that he goes down in flames. Leave such a burning stench that it turns the public against rich folks, Republicans, and most especially those who are both.
I didn’t know how the Green Party picked nominees, either – so I looked it up and am now muchos smarteros.
States may hold their own conventions or caucuses, which appoint delegates to the national convention. See? Just like the Big Boys!
Well, except for the fact that the media don’t inform the voters about details like “they exist” – let alone when and where they happen.
Electoral College? Oh hell yeah that’s gotta go – it’s been obsolete ever since the invention of radio.